Father prosecuted for arson after attempt to wake son backfires

A father, who poured diesel fuel on his son's bed and ignited it to wake him up, recently was prosecuted for arson in Qingpu district of Shanghai. The case sparked netizens to comment and some recalled unusual ways of waking up family members.

The arson incident occured when Mao Long discovered his son was still sleeping in bed around 7 am on April 26. The father and son were excavator drivers and had agreed to work at a construction site at 6 am, so Mao tried to get his son out of bed and go to work.

First the father pulled at the quilt on the bed and shouted at the son, but the younger Mao did not move. Mao was angry and took a spade from outside, pretending to beat him in an attempt to make him get to work. But the son still slept.

Mao was so angry that he brought a bucket of diesel fuel into the room and shouted that if he did not get up he would ignite it. No response. Mao poured some diesel fuel on the bed, and used a lighter to ignite it. The son quickly jumped out of bed.

When the father and son brought water to extinguish the fire, it was already out of control. Thanks to help from neighbors, the fire was controlled but it wasn't put out until firefighters came.

A neighbor surnamed Wang said he found the room on fire, with dense smoke blowing out of a window, and he called firefighters.

Qingpu prosecutors said that Mao deliberately set fire to flammable objects on the bed, and though the fire did not cause severe damage, it threatened other residents in the building and other apartments.

If the neighbors hadn't helped control the fire and the firefighters extinguished it, there would have been huge losses, and Mao's behavior constituted the crime of arson, prosecutors said.

When Chinese netizens read the story, they were shocked by the method Mao used to wake someone up, and made fun that the father was a real father, and commented on it.

"I cannot hold my laugh while knowing the case, it was so weird," a web user with the online name Shini Zhouxiaojie wrote on the social media network Sina Weibo.

Yizhihenanjing, another web user, blamed the son for being too lazy and said young people should get up early and earn more money to share the family's responsibility, rather than irritating the father .

Web user Qingcai said that once during a winter vacation his mother poured cold water on him to wake him up. "It was really the same effect like this one. But I did not know the law at that time," he said.